80% of those who have SARS-CoV-2 experience a clinically mild version of COVID-19, meaning that they get better without needing to go to the hospital.Risk factors for severe disease include being male, being older, and having underlying health conditions, among other factors.
What drives these risk factors is not entirely clear. Some experts have suggested that an excessive immune reaction in response to the virus is at the heart of the damage to the lungs and other parts of the body that people with severe COVID-19 experience.
Writing in Nature Biotechnology, scientists from the Center for Digital Health at the Berlin Institute of Health (BIH) and the Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin in Germany aimed to tease out the molecular actions.